Finally, some PICTURES!

 

For the past two weekends, I've been playing the piano for Roxi Starr (Susan Mele's lounge-singer character) in the show "Woman on the Rag." Here is the two of us on stage.

 

My mother, brother and his wife came to visit a few weeks ago. This is a picture of my mother standing in front of the State House in Annapolis taking a picture of the rest of us.

 

I am substitute teaching music at a local high school. Look at the great view of Baltimore from my classroom!

The Blind Leading the Blind

I recently finished reading Oliver Sacks' book "Island of the Colorblind." It tells the story of his two trips to Micronesia where he visited Pohnpei, Pingelap, Guam, Rota and Saipan.

Let me start by saying, 57 pages of footnotes for a 199 page book? 57 pages?! Someone has to learn to organize his thoughts! Who wants to keep hopping to the back of the book all the time? It's like reading one of those "create your own adventure" children's story books.

His description of the sakau ceremony particularly tickled me. Here is a quote from the book, "The roots were all macerated now, their lactones emulsified..." blah, blah, blah. This is the writing of a person whose body went to Pohnpei, but whose mind was left behind in some ivy-encrusted East coast library.

The final 100 pages or so go on and on and on and on and on and on about cycads and the diseases that they may or may not cause. Ironically, these are the pages where the author becomes blind. He is traveling through breathtaking islands with extraordinary people and spellbinding history, but all he can see is cycads. Nothing else is visible to him.

Well, that is your book review for the day. I feel like I should write something about Micronesia every now and then, so there it is.

The Power of Originality

Last night I went to a talk by the composer John Adams and the new conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop. I ushered, so I got in free.

I miss Micronesia very, very much, but an evening like last night reminds me of what I missed while I was in the Pacific: The Power of Originality - a rare commodity anywhere. In fact, in terms of composers, Adams said that the number of true originals can probably be counted on "the fingers of half a hand."

I resisted the temptation to ask John Adams if he felt intimidated following in George Washington's footsteps. I'm sure he's heard that one before.

New Show!

Hello loyal fans!

The latest Dan Meyer theatrical presentation opens this weekend: Friday, September 14, 8:00pm at Baltimore's Theatre Project. That's the same place where you saw me a year ago in "Welcome to Micronesia".

This time the show is called "Woman on the Rag." Come and have some unpredicable fun!!!

Hair Dressing

Being a bus patron in Baltimore puts you at the bottom of the totem pole. That's me now.

Baltimore once had a wonderful system of street cars. The street car used to go down Harford Road right by my house.

Unfortunately, the car industry bought up all the street cars in the mid-1900s and tore out all the tracks so that people would buy cars.

Therefore, Baltimore is left with a fairly disfunctional bus system.

On the positive side, I'm getting a lot of reading done! And I've also been collecting interesting names of beauty salons.

What is it about hair dressers that inspire such outlandish names for their shops?

Here are some of the names I've collected during my bus trips around Baltimore City (the parenthetical comments are mine):

A Touch of Paris (will my hair look like the Eifel Tower?)
Annointed Hands of Perfection Hair Salon (ego, ego, ego!)
Atmoshears Hair Salon (baa!)
Lion's Denn Hair Salon (rahr!)
Mane Details (neigh!)
Sit 'N' Pretty Salon (thank goodness, no animal references)
Altunativzes (yes that is how it is spelled, try sounding that out, it's hard!)